


Au Jus

by cognomen



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cannibalism, Dead animals, M/M, food fetishism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-08
Updated: 2013-04-08
Packaged: 2017-12-07 20:59:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/753019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Do you hunt?" Will asks the question while they are eating, with his eyes on his plate and to the side, though they lift marginally to trail the path of Hannibal's fork when he draws it from his mouth and turns it in his hand. Pointed prongs face down toward the table as he lowers it, un-threatening.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Au Jus

"Do you hunt?" Will asks the question while they are eating, with his eyes on his plate and to the side, though they lift marginally to trail the path of Hannibal's fork when he draws it from his mouth and turns it in his hand. Pointed prongs face down toward the table as he lowers it, un-threatening. 

Will likes to ask questions when Hannibal will have to chew before he answers them. He finds he doesn't mind, it doesn't wear on his patience, and there are other habits that are worse to have. He finishes chewing, mouth shut and jaw working until the food has surrendered it's resistance, relented texturally against his molars and he swallows with his tongue pushed against the roof of his mouth to be sure nothing remains in his teeth before he speaks.

"Yes." 

Will pushes a cut slice of meat across half an inch of plate, pries it with his fork until it turns over, and his attention is on it like it's the only thing in the room, leaving Hannibal to watch his eyebrows, the exposed, vulnerable part in his hair. He waits for a moment, and then when he realizes the question won't come until he's chewing again, he crosses his knife diagonal to his standing fork and parts the venison along the grain, brightly pink in the middle and weeping juices as his knife rends it, but it parts like it was never whole to begin with.

The fork is most of the way to his mouth when the followup arrives.

"Will you show me?" 

This is rather backwards, of course. He closes his mouth over the meat on his fork and the tines leave impressions on his tongue as he draws it back through his teeth. The muscle shards against his tongue when he presses it with his teeth, but it is not so cooked that it doesn't still leave the flavor of blood. He has seen Will Graham shoot a man and eat animal. Hannibal wonders how long it will take for Will to realize that it could be done the other way.

He sets his fork prongs down on the plate, and the metal on china does not make the barest sound, but Wills eyes follow the motion anyway, and the prongs of his own fork, still embedded in the meat slide forward in a motion that mimics. When Will lays his fork down as well, the position could be a mirror image of Hannibal's, only with the tines lifting a corner of his thinly sliced steak in a wide half circle of pink ringed brown. The fibers of muscle glisten, oozing clear. 

"Yes." Hannibal says, and he is thinking about the chest freezer in the finished basement, and how near to full it already is and how much meat another kill would bring in. He is thinking about how he wished he had cooked the tongue with the steaks, to see if Will would have shied from it before tasting how buttery and soft the meat was and how little it needed beyond salt and pepper to have a thick flavor all its own. "It can get messy."

Messier if you were as wasteful as some hunters. Will's tongue wets his lower lip, and a stray thought slides through Hannibal's mind of how it would look in a cast iron pan, pressed flat under his spatula until it was barely seared. It does not shock him, but it settles at the stem of his mind and coils in snug like a threat and he reaches for his wine, sure it is screaming in his eyes. Will never looks at his eyes. Not even when he nods as if he understands what 'messy' means in regards to blood and animal hair on his fingers, and the separation of skin from carcass to reveal pink muscles beneath.

-

The gun is steadier in Will's hands than Hannibal would have supposed. It's cold enough for breath to fog, for an excuse leant to shaking fingers or a quivering body, but once Hannibal has set Will's hand curled around the stock and grip of the rifle they hold it steady and he looks along the sight so he doesn't have to notice the proximity required for that to be set up. 

Placing one finger under the barrel of the over-under, Hannibal tips it up ever so slightly, and presses back to seat the pad at the butt of the stock so it's saddled firmly against Will's collar bone. It would be easier to touch him and press him into place, but he doesn't, he just wordlessly adjusts the gun until it's correct.

"Push your cheek against the stock to sight, and hold it against your shoulder firmly," Hannibal says, by way of instruction. The rest works more or less the same as Will's service revolver, except for the rail mounted sight. He keeps his voice low, and steps back to the side, then touches just once, to push Will's lower back into alignment, and then the gun wavers and shifts until Hannibal stops touching and says nothing further.

He tucks his own gun under his arm and leaves the muzzle pointed at the ground when he's not aiming it, and Will mimics without being told, and copies too the way Hannibal slides his other hand into his pocket and makes his body into an easy, relaxed line, and he has a distinctly sleepy set to his eyelids that makes him look half sly behind the big lenses of his glasses.

They find it by tracks and scat, and Hannibal keeps his hands in his pockets and watches the information process faster behind Will's eyes, though he's always looking back the way the tracks came when they cross them, seeing where it came from, and occasionally he takes a step or two, twisting his head slowly on his neck with a peculiar grace and a specific set to his shoulders.

When he goes forward at last they find it across the length of farmer's field grazing at the very edge of the woods. Hannibal goes down to one knee on the ground and Will crouches low and brings his gun up. The animal is peculiar, a buck deer with a coat white in patches like paint had been dropped over its back. One antler twisted strangely down against its head. Hannibal waits, letting Will raise the gun and press his cheek into the stock, push it hard against his shoulder and take aim.

He takes a very long aim, his eyes unfocused, his breath creating a pocket of steam that drifts down under his lifted arm. Hannibal looks off in the other direction and speaks in a low tone.

"If we don't hunt them, there are so many they starve to death," he says very slowly, without preamble. "Hunger makes them wander... with an empty belly he goes across the freeway and desperation makes him rush. When the car hits him he tries to jump at the last second, lifts himself over the hood but he hasn't seen the windshield. It looks like clear space but when he hits it, it shatters him, shatters the windshield. He breaks the dash board open and the cracked plastic shreds his chest while the crumpled hood slices open his belly. The antlers might miss the driver or the passenger in the twist, but not both-"

He doesn't have to finish, because the gunshot slams down over his words like a flood gate and he feels the corners of his mouth twist up in a faint smile as the echoes slow in the muted world, and when he turns the Buck has gone maybe two steps, but staggers and slips down in the grass and Will is breathing hard and holding the gun away from him like it had burned him.

Hannibal had seen a deerstruck car once - with parts in the engine and flung all the way into the back seat, and it had been such a waste.

-

When he opens it, pressing the knife tip under the sternum with the blade pointed up toward him, the blood comes out steaming over the side and stains the patched fur. It takes one cut to get the knife through the abdominal wall in a neat line and make a hole big enough for his hand to slide into the hot insides and push up on the flat of the knife. The motion is smooth for Hannibal, practiced even though blood makes his hands slippery and goes cold fast on his hands in the chill of the air.

"Shouldn't we hang it up?" Will asks, and it breaks the rhythm a little, slides ever so sharply under Hannibal's skin the way his knife was sliding now under the buck's and he shakes his head. 

He takes out the urinary tract, tosses it aside with the reproductive organs. The rest he removes carefully into bags. After the second, which receives the liver, Will begins to hold them for him, careful and studious and without asking any more questions.

"Americans are squeamish about what they eat," Hannibal says, and deposits a perfect set of lungs, a large, well muscled heart. "It's wasteful." 

When he turns the buck over onto its back he can see that the turned down antler had grown into the other side of its face, pushing painfully through the skin below its cheek and exiting again through the emptied eye socket in a cruel trick of nature's. Will can see it too. Some strange gentling of the blow of death, when it was ending suffering, but Hannibal doesn't remark on it - it works this way too, it works better this way - the slow way.

The muscle is still hot when he turns back a corner of skin over the ribs with his knife, separating skin and hide from the meat, and he cuts a sliver before it's cooled enough to take on bacteria, though his bloody hands are some concern, it's worth it to let the soft, warm meat slide over his tongue while it still retains living heat and flowing blood. It's chewy and vital and it takes some work to separate the fibers with his incisors but it tastes more like meat than almost anything else.

Will covers his mouth and sits back, but his eyes are on Hannibal's for the first time since they'd come out, watching, studying. Hannibal works the knife again, slides it so sharp between the jut of rib and the thin, healthy muscle that covered it and strips a thin slice off the bone, which he offers wordlessly.

Will chews, and chews and then finally swallows after a long time, after his throat had started to work, once to cope with the extra saliva, twice to try and get it down. A third time to keep it there. It's mostly psychological, a product of so long relying on old, dead meat that one brought home from the supermarket. They were so removed from death that the taste of life was hard to stomach.

In his favor, Will does not bring it back up, but he sits the ride home with the deer rolled up in a tarp in the truck bed in a mirror of Hannibal's peaceful quiet while the radio goes on at a level that's almost sub aural.

-

Blood gushes thickly when they hang it head down off the wooden timber of his back porch, high enough to keep dogs off of it. It pours thick and sluggish over Hannibal's hands, and Will gets the worst of it down by the head where he's supporting the front legs until the chain through the hocks is looped over the beam. 

Hannibal steps off the chair, his chest cold and sticky with it, and Will has enough mind to let go of the buck at least while his mind has gone off to that quiet and distant place, with his mouth a wreck of darkened, thick red, his hands and face and neck awash in it dripping down like it's now doing from the carcass into the grass behind the house.

Will is looking at his hands, red - but Hannibal is looking at his mouth. Red, also - and he is thinking about how it would taste to push his own mouth against it and curl his tongue between Will's lips, and if all he would taste would be the steely blood, or if anything else would linger, like the raw, coppery meat from the field.

Instead he follows the direction the blood is dripping, down - down Will's chest, down his belly, and while his eyes are still far away and so pale. Hannibal hits his knees on the wooden deck before he can think about the mess he drops into - and the blood isn't cold yet, just tepid where it puddles, not clotted but getting there.

He pushes bloodied hands into the points of Wills hips and gets a gasp. Will's chin tips up, he looks away, but his hands come down onto Hannibal's shoulders and that's more 'yes' than he'll get in words. The zipper parts tooth by tooth and he counts them like vertebrae as he conquers them with bloodied fingers. He parts the fabric with his fingers and draws Will's stiffening cock free and he thinks about how unappetizing those are - all vascular tissue- and it keeps him from sinking his teeth in when he guides it into his mouth.

But he can taste the blood from his fingers, and clean skin, and Will's length grows heavy and thick on his tongue, filling his mouth with something living like not even the finest steak ever has. Hannibal pulls him deeper, pushing his tongue out over his lower teeth so he can feel them sinking into the underside of his own tongue, but there's no hint of them for Will. And then it's over. Will shakes and jerks, his knees threaten to give entirely but Hannibal curls a hand warningly around the back of one and shakes until it locks, and then there's a new taste on his tongue, bitter and salt and vital and living painted over the blood in his mouth.

It's only a harmless taste, Hannibal thinks, as he sits back and pushes his tongue against the roof of his mouth to feel the exact texture of slickness - it's like nothing else. Only a taste, because even if his white buck has an antler twisted up through his eye that leaves him suffering alive, he's never seen anything else like Will.

Just a taste.


End file.
